For M.W.

There is no transcience of twilight in The beauty of your soft dusk-dimpled face, No flicker of a slender flame in space, In crucibles, fragility crystalline. There is no fragrance of the jessamine About you, no pathos of some old place At dusk, that crumbles like moth-eater lace Beneath the touch. Nor has there ever been. Your love is like the folk-song's flaming rise In cane-lipped southern people, like their soul Which burst its bondage in a bold travail; Your voice is like them singing, soft and wise, Your face, sweetly efflgent of the whole, Inviolate of ways that would feile.